I dunno but I suspect it's something to do with communication by computer; communication intercommunication; rental, hire and leasing of communications apparatus; providing access to electronic communication networks for the access to electronic mail-boxes; electronic bulletin board services; electronic transmission of data and documents via a global computer network (Internet) or other databases; delivery of data and messages by electronic transmission; providing access to an electronic communication network for the downloading of information and data from a global computer network (Internet); consulting services in the fields of telecommunications; providing access to electronic bulletin boards.
1) Microsoft Access compatable software built into AppleWorks. This is one of the main things business want's before they jump on the mac bandwagon.
2) Randezvous clustering and processor sharing technology. Many of the biotech companies would love a super fast, easy to set up, cluster computer that will essentially act as one computer at the kernel level.
3) Another fun .Mac thing that alows people to host BB and some other fun things from their .Mac account. I doubt this would be useful though.
I'm thinking it's a professional services for companies, an enterprise version of .Mac to compete with tools that companies such as IBM and Compaq have.
That trademark description is pretty useless. It seems to describe everything from a notebook connected to a desktop as a FW drive to the Internet itself, and USENET besides.
Apparently it's some sort of distributed system, but it's entirely vague about exactly what is being distributed. "Grid" to me implies distributed computing, but that's a guess.
XGrid uses the same prefix as XServe, so it's in their server line. But I can't tease anything else out of the name and trademark info.
<strong>That trademark description is pretty useless. It seems to describe everything from a notebook connected to a desktop as a FW drive to the Internet itself, and USENET besides.
</strong><hr></blockquote>
Trademark descriptions are nearly always so vague as to cover everything including the pope's cart - no need to give away ideas to competitors, until you absolutely HAVE to.... :-o
Look at the amount of discussion we got out of the GigaWire description!
The idea of "The Grid" [as i understand it] it to be basically the internet, but instead of sharing just data, it shares proccessing power (processing cycles?) as well. making the world one big supercomputer.
maybe then we can ask it "Why 42?" <img src="graemlins/lol.gif" border="0" alt="[Laughing]" />
Rumours about clustering capeabilities for future Mac OS X versions have been floating around for quite some time. Pooch offers a great insight on what X can offer in this field. Biomedicine is a definitive target for Apple at the moment and those companies are surely interested in running for example Blast on clustered Xserves. Apples Rendevouz would fit in here to allow for supereasy setup of clusters.
<creative speculation>
Could be a blade like number crunching hardware device. Like an Xserve RAID with processor modules instead of pluggable harddrives.
Interconnected using Gigawire, whatever it may really be.
Considering the upcoming XServe RAID release, this makes perfect sense. But I'd prefer (1 or the upcoming 10 Gbit-)Ethernet instead of Gigawire. No need to make special Gigawire switches but instead using inexpensive standard hardware.
It would be cool to have one blade - or the XServe RAID - act as sort of a master providing a "custom light version" - just the neccessary elements - of the OS and software to all the other blades in the rack. Thus giving you the opportunity to configure individual clusters within the rack. This combined with a nice GUI-based management software like the XServe management tools enhanced with the clustering and OS/software configuration tools.
Well, make it two of the blades for fail-over protection. And all the blade are to be hot-swapable.
Just an idea...
Why was't clustering there from the start? And i wonder whether Apple will be using S-ATA on the XServe RAID.
As I said... creative speculation about gigawire. We don't even know what it really is yet. :-)
Gbit Ethernet would be an obvious feature of course.
I can imagine a 1U Rack Backplane unit where you slide in blades. 3.5" wide and very deep. On the front a standard Xserve drive bay module to keep the sytem on if you don't like netbooting your blade.
Redundant power supplies in the carrier unit.
Alternatively a 3U mount where you can fit the blades in vertically.
Xserve RAID will NOT use S-ATA! It will use the same ATA100 bus architecture as used in the Xserve, so the drive modules are interchangeable. Maxtor bigdrive support will be included in the future. So once we get those 250GB and 320GB drives certified for 24/7 use in servers you could max an Xserve RAID to 4.4TB! (RAID0)
. . .maybe then we can ask it "Why 42?" [Laughing]
-ST
or why not 43? <hr></blockquote>
I think because we all want to know what it means, I mean thats why we are all here and why Earth is here. I don't want to ruin the story but just go out and buy, or rent from your local public library, The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy, the first in the increasingly inacurately named Hitchhiker's Trilogy. The book is great! Douglas Adams was great, and he liked Macs.
Comments
Just a guess though.
J :cool:
<strong>Jamie, is that the trademark description?</strong><hr></blockquote>
Ja
1) Microsoft Access compatable software built into AppleWorks. This is one of the main things business want's before they jump on the mac bandwagon.
2) Randezvous clustering and processor sharing technology. Many of the biotech companies would love a super fast, easy to set up, cluster computer that will essentially act as one computer at the kernel level.
3) Another fun .Mac thing that alows people to host BB and some other fun things from their .Mac account. I doubt this would be useful though.
A@ron
Apparently it's some sort of distributed system, but it's entirely vague about exactly what is being distributed. "Grid" to me implies distributed computing, but that's a guess.
XGrid uses the same prefix as XServe, so it's in their server line. But I can't tease anything else out of the name and trademark info.
<a href="http://www.globus.org/research/default.asp"; target="_blank">http://www.globus.org/research/default.asp</a>;
<strong>That trademark description is pretty useless. It seems to describe everything from a notebook connected to a desktop as a FW drive to the Internet itself, and USENET besides.
</strong><hr></blockquote>
Trademark descriptions are nearly always so vague as to cover everything including the pope's cart - no need to give away ideas to competitors, until you absolutely HAVE to.... :-o
Look at the amount of discussion we got out of the GigaWire description!
engpjp
The idea of "The Grid" [as i understand it] it to be basically the internet, but instead of sharing just data, it shares proccessing power (processing cycles?) as well. making the world one big supercomputer.
maybe then we can ask it "Why 42?" <img src="graemlins/lol.gif" border="0" alt="[Laughing]" />
-ST
<strong>. . .maybe then we can ask it "Why 42?" <img src="graemlins/lol.gif" border="0" alt="[Laughing]" />
-ST</strong><hr></blockquote>
or why not 43?
<creative speculation>
Could be a blade like number crunching hardware device. Like an Xserve RAID with processor modules instead of pluggable harddrives.
Interconnected using Gigawire, whatever it may really be.
</creative speculation>
<strong><creative speculation>
Could be a blade like number crunching hardware device. Like an Xserve RAID with processor modules instead of pluggable harddrives.
Interconnected using Gigawire, whatever it may really be.
</creative speculation></strong><hr></blockquote>
Considering the upcoming XServe RAID release, this makes perfect sense. But I'd prefer (1 or the upcoming 10 Gbit-)Ethernet instead of Gigawire. No need to make special Gigawire switches but instead using inexpensive standard hardware.
It would be cool to have one blade - or the XServe RAID - act as sort of a master providing a "custom light version" - just the neccessary elements - of the OS and software to all the other blades in the rack. Thus giving you the opportunity to configure individual clusters within the rack. This combined with a nice GUI-based management software like the XServe management tools enhanced with the clustering and OS/software configuration tools.
Well, make it two of the blades for fail-over protection. And all the blade are to be hot-swapable.
Just an idea...
Why was't clustering there from the start? And i wonder whether Apple will be using S-ATA on the XServe RAID.
[ 11-06-2002: Message edited by: RolandG ]</p>
Gbit Ethernet would be an obvious feature of course.
I can imagine a 1U Rack Backplane unit where you slide in blades. 3.5" wide and very deep. On the front a standard Xserve drive bay module to keep the sytem on if you don't like netbooting your blade.
Redundant power supplies in the carrier unit.
Alternatively a 3U mount where you can fit the blades in vertically.
Xserve RAID will NOT use S-ATA! It will use the same ATA100 bus architecture as used in the Xserve, so the drive modules are interchangeable. Maxtor bigdrive support will be included in the future. So once we get those 250GB and 320GB drives certified for 24/7 use in servers you could max an Xserve RAID to 4.4TB! (RAID0)
The Xserve RAID specs are widely known, <a href="http://forums.appleinsider.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=search&search_forum=1"; target="_blank">search Future Hardware</a> for RAID or Xserve to find a few.
[edit: Typo]
[ 11-06-2002: Message edited by: monsterjaeger ]</p>
<a href="http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0211/14.pooch.php"; target="_blank">maccentral article on xserve cluster</a>
if Apple could some how make an iGrid kind of system so family LANs could do this, wow.
. . .maybe then we can ask it "Why 42?" [Laughing]
-ST
or why not 43? <hr></blockquote>
I think because we all want to know what it means, I mean thats why we are all here and why Earth is here. I don't want to ruin the story but just go out and buy, or rent from your local public library, The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy, the first in the increasingly inacurately named Hitchhiker's Trilogy. The book is great! Douglas Adams was great, and he liked Macs.